As promised, I finally got time to look at the offspring that Mike Doty had managed to rear from my F1 Lightning X Lighting Maroon Clownfish pair.  While Mike had initially stated he felt the split was 50/50, today’s visit showed something different.
All told, I only managed to count 3 white stripe offspring in the BRT. Meanwhile, there appeared to be 6 distinctive Lightning Maroon-type offspring. What I didn’t see were any fish that, at this point, looked atypical from either known phenotype.



With only 9 (approximate) juveniles, the sample is far from conclusive. The 3/6 split could be representative of anything from a 50/50 split to a 25/75 split. A new phenotype could be missing because none simply survived in this first successful run.
That said, the 3/6 split, if a valid sample, would represent something we perhaps don’t want to  see.  It would imply that Lightning is straight dominant, but it would also imply that a double-dose of Lightning is in fact fatal to the offspring and they fail to develop.  This is one of the current working hypotheses for the Snowflake gene in Ocellaris, and anecdotal reports continue to bolster that line of thinking (reports are anecdotal in so much as a breeder saying “It’s about a 60-70% snowflake result” is not the same as a breeder saying “I got 140 Snowflakes and 65 wild types in this clutch”).
It is fair to say that there is still hope for these fish – they are QUITE YOUNG and all we can truly discern at this point is that they outwardly either are white stripes or aberrant.  My tune could change as these babies develop, or if subsequent results are different. It is not surprising to me though, to see similarities emerge in various mutation types.  We already have Picasso/Platinum and the sister mutation of DaVinci/Wyoming White. Much as I wonder if these twin mutations could represent the same gene in different species (or simply a similar genetic mutation in sibling species), would we come to find out that Lightning is in fact not unlike Snowflake? After all, genetic analysis has revealed that the Maroon Clownfish are in fact very closely related to the Percula/Ocellaris complex, so it would not be surprising to find similar or the same genes present in all these species based on their common shared ancestor.
It is also an interesting footnote to observe that these tiny juvenile clownfishes DO represent a the first F2 generation of Lightning Maroons.